Anyone here do Lisp?
How about APL? That was a really freaky thing.
ADA anyone? I did some military stuff in that.

C# is for developers.
Programmers work in C.
C++ is just a handy way of organizing and rapid developing good C code.

Click to expand...

I learned Lisp in a class - not my cup of tea... I programmed a little APL on a dedicated IBM PC in high school; yep a weird language. Never did ADA but reviewed it in ACM material. It seemed a little too “large” for me.

Did quite a bit of Perl at one point; another large language but you can pick an choose what to use in it. It’s greatest advantage is also its disadvantage (flexibility).

Im new here, and a proud owner of a teac a2300 anyways, back on point, i remember learning basic on my own. got into trouble in highschool, programming the scientific calculators to say rather bad things lol. it was easy to do.
Aaron

it's not so much the languages of the past that concerns me, it's the massive proliferation
of new languages. since "the good old days" there's now C#, Objective-C, Swift, F#, and the
scripts: powershell, java, VBA, and the "shell" style python, Perl, PHP, smalltalk, turtle, ruby,
and SQL, R, and hundreds other.

then there's there 5 million apps running on just the phones. wait for the inevitable
no-going-back hardware architecture changes coming.

I see chaos, running iOS/Android on a VM on a phone with inter-VM switching to allow incompatible
and never-updated 2017 and 2019 apps to run on the same phone. then there will be the byte-stream
machine code interpretation to allow old to run on older to run on ancient platforms.

then there's lets put AI on the phone (Huawei) or VR or 13 channel sound with MQA and software
as a service to do 64/384 in software.

there's still only about 19million professional programmers that are currently engaged in big-scale projects.

in about 5 years. meanwhile I'm waiting for Apple to consolidate their platforms and give me the touchscreen
of the pods, pads, and phones onto the Mac. I've used them since 68K days, suffered with PowerPCs, now
intels, and I see a 32-core 16Ghz ARM-variation to emulate current OSX/Intel code on iOS for Mac.

be prepared, major bux to be made for converting existing code to new platforms, and with interpreted code
that is reverse-engineerable, the smarter guys will make a killing.

I actually programmed in machine language. Once. In school. Then there was a four bit "microprocessor" we made in a lab on breadboards with tons of TTL chips and spaghetti wire wrap. Sixteen instructions and not a lot of "memory". The "display" was a pair of seven segment LED numbers. When I set up this poll I was reluctant to include Assembly cuz I thought nobody does it except hard core video compression guys, etc. I'm glad I kept it in.

I used to commute by train a lot and my company used those little Psion Organiser things ( remember those anyone ? ). I had a spare one and a manual, so I taught myself programming on it using the two line LCD display. It used a version of BASIC (OPL I think it was) and with that I created text based games like Hangman.

I found it fascinating working through the logic of a simple game like Hangman - storing previously guessed letters, generating a random word from a dictionary file, scanning that word for multiple occurances of the same letter and so on.

I did some Dataflex years ago and COBOL and then went on to do some Progress which was one of the first OO 4G languages. I left that behind and went down the technical / networking route instead but to this day I wish I had kept on with the programming......

Never got that deep into the OOP stuff; I evolved (devolved?) into doing pretty specialized technical support database work (Oracle) and later business analytic stuff for a short time (large database stuff like cubes and data warehouse stuff.

I had the ability to do C++ for embedded, and I do like the additional capabilities and language extensions, but the embedded stuff I wrote for was memory limited, and there tends to be a bit more overhead for C++ (memory management, etc.). The compilers I used for embedded C resulted in such nicely optimized code that I could not justify the time it would take to stick with assembly only.

I very much like and utilize the OOP capabilities of C++, when memory is not an issue. C++ Builder provided a lot of Pascal and C++ objects ready to plug in, and I really enjoyed generating multi-threaded apps with ease. Code reuse with an OOP language, via user created libraries and linked in modules is a real step up in efficiency. C++ Builder has changed hands a couple of times since my last project, so I don't know if it has improved, decayed, or remained on par.

I've used Visual Basic, and was able to do what I wanted, but, like most things MS produces, it abstracts the programmer from the innards a bit too much. It is good for what it does though.

I started with Fortran on punch cards, and my last project was an ARM-7 based project, with PC-based engineering tools (for lab and field). It sure was a relief when flash came into vogue. Erasing and programming EPROMS was a pain. I still can do it by the way. I also still have a nice DEC PDP-1103 and an IMSAI 8080 with paper tape capability, and a Heath-Zenith H-89, and a wide carriage daisy wheel printer (and boxes of green bar to go with).

There is more in my lab, but that is enough from me. I do likes me some programming...

Ditto, circa 1985 or so (age 12 via a TRS-80...) just to see if I could. By the time I finished entering a few hundred lines of code, straining my eyes (and tolerance) debugging it, and finally got it to half-ass compile and run correctly, I threw up my hands, cursed the programming gods, and never looked in the direction of code again until a couple of decades or so later where I circumstantially had to pass a class in COBOL so as to obtain my CIS degree. It's amazing the havoc a misplaced/erroneously typed "." or "/" can create... How some of you guys and gals do this for a living, much less a hobby, never fails to amaze me. For some mysterious reason, Python keeps whispering in my ear to pick up a book and give it a shot. It just something about objects, class inheritance, and polymorphism that keeps me backing away from the keyboard.

Ditto, circa 1985 or so (age 12 via a TRS-80...) just to see if I could. By the time I finished entering a few hundred lines of code, straining my eyes (and tolerance) debugging it, and finally got it to half-ass compile and run correctly, I threw up my hands, cursed the programming gods, and never looked in the direction of code again until a couple of decades or so later where I circumstantially had to pass a class in COBOL so as to obtain my CIS degree. It's amazing the havoc a misplaced/erroneously typed "." or "/" can create... How some of you guys and gals do this for a living, much less a hobby, never fails to amaze me. For some mysterious reason, Python keeps whispering in my ear to pick up a book and give it a shot. It just something about objects, class inheritance, and polymorphism that keeps me backing away from the keyboard.

For some mysterious reason, Python keeps whispering in my ear to pick up a book and give it a shot. It just something about objects, class inheritance, and polymorphism that keeps me backing away from the keyboard.

Click to expand...

I just added a grudging vote for Python. My only involvement up until recently was to write library stuff in C (.so, .dll) that some sluggish section of a python utility "imported" for speed. As a language it seems arbitrary and capricious and cobbled together, with silly terminology like "tuple" and "dict" (who's gonna wanna say "dict" at the workplace?). IMHO memory management IS programming. OTOH it's taken over from Matlab and IDL the "science" market and there's a ton of stuff out there already written. I'm starting to like it for what it is.

These days, SQL should be in there. My stuff frequently wrapped SQL into C++ and Pascal database objects. The objects handled the lower level SQL activities, abstracting the PC app programmer from the lower level details. For example, elevators come in many many flavors, depending upon selected variables. My apps took the variables, and performed SQL activities (mostly queries), and automatically generated system schematics, assembly drawings, parts lists, and system configuration default settings, based upon sales application output.